How Mark Zuckerberg deals with stress of a ‘million’ bad news messages each day

Meta Inc. (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg (FIle Image)

Much has been made of the ‘morning rituals’ of successful billionaires, but Mark Zuckerberg starts his day like most of us – facing the plethora of unread messages blowing up his phone. In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan released Thursday, the Meta chief executive revealed that he starts his day by checking his phone every morning and finds a “million messages” that are “usually not good.”

“People reserve the good stuff to tell me in person, right?” the billionaire told Joe Rogan. “So it’s like what’s going on in the world that I need to pay attention to?”

Mark Zuckerberg, 38, compared his daily morning routine of receiving bad news to getting punched in the stomach. “It’s almost like every day you wake up you are punched in the stomach,” he said.

It is perhaps not surprising that Zuckerberg starts his day with “not good” messages, given the challenging year his company Meta has had.

In October, a Wall Street Journal investigation - ‘The Facebook Files’ - revealed how the social media platform exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, played down the negative effects on young users of its Instagram app, made changes to its algorithm that made the platform "angrier," and had a weak response to alarms raised by employees over how the platform is used in developing countries by human traffickers.

A few months later, in February, Meta shares crashed 26% - erasing over $200 billion from the company’s market capitalization. Zuckerberg’s own wealth went down by $29 billion in the stock drop.

So how does the tech billionaire deal with the stress of bad news? He revealed that as well in his interview with Rogan.

“Then it’s like okay, well f***, what do I need to do to go and reset myself and be productive and not stressed by this?” he said. “How do I do that?

“I basically read, I take in all the information and then go and do something physical for an hour or two and reset myself.”

(With inputs from Reuters)